Feelings
by twicebornbacchus
Summary: Oneshot! Set pre-series. Dita gets her software updated, and Zima wonders if humans will one day be able to acknowledge and accept the existence of non-human emotions. Persocoms can love, he knows...just differently. Written for zelinxia.


"Are you worried about her?"

Zima's head turned, following the quiet voice, feminine and familiar in an altogether unfamiliar way, like the voice of an ancestor and a stranger all in one. Chitose Hibiya stood to his right, leaning against the railing, staring up at him. Black hair (_like Dita's_, he thought) spilled down to her mid-back (_unlike Dita, _he thought). She wore a tailored suit, tapered on the edges with blue ribbon, white and red stripes cutting the finer lines of her figure.

Humans always had an eye for fashion. Even at work.

They stood, staring at one another, on the catwalk above the main lab at Piffle Princess Enterprises, where Chitose had returned to work as a consultant in human-persocom relations. Zima could recall (in the instant that it took to access the information in his database) that when the board of directors asked why she desired to work in a non-technician role after years of absence that her only reply had been, "I have a special interest in such matters."

He blinked at her, not because he needed to – his eyelids were made from a soft, skin-textured silicon-based film, but no tear-solution was needed to constantly coat the eye, moisten the cornea. He was programmed to blink autonomously as part of a number of affects that made his non-verbal communication more human, thus making his presence less disconcerting. Nobody living wanted a robot that would just _stare _at you. _The uncanny valley effect, _he thought. Humans were very efficient at finding ways to make themselves more comfortable.

"Did you ask if I was worried about her?"

"You're thinking that's an odd question to ask, aren't you?" Chitose smiled at him and he wondered, briefly, if this was the same look that mothers gave their young children when they hurt themselves by accident: it was a look of sympathy and kindness.

"I'm not programmed to be worried about her."

"_That _sounds like something _she _would say."

Zima's cageyness fell away into a laugh. "You're right." Chitose and Dita had only spoken, briefly at best, a few times…but Dita…well, she had a personality that hit you like a ton of bricks.

He stared down at Dita's body, almost lifeless (_always lifeless, _he corrected himself) below where it lay stretched on the table. Her eyes were shut; she looked so much like a human, sleeping peacefully, except for the chords and wires snaking away from her body, black vines in a forest of steely metals. She was getting a software upgrade, nothing for a cause of concern…but things could happen. Technology, even at the top of its game, could go wrong: glitches, malfunctions. Accidents. Sometimes it was easier to wipe a computer clean and restart from scratch rather than try and save a crumbling system, and while he felt no animosity for the scientists and technicians and chemists who had created them (no, a sense of _gratefulness _was what he felt, because being given life – or some mimicry of it – had given him the chance to love Dita) he still knew that, with the push of a button, he would lose her to them.

When a human died, the corpse decayed, or was burned away to expedite the removal of the unseemly dead thing. But if Dita died, the Dita that was the intangible ghost in the machine below…to get rid of the hardware would be a waste. She would restart – no, not _her, _but someone _new, _wearing her skin, looking through her eyes… He shuddered. As persocoms, they could potentially live forever – their personalities and memories could be downloaded and re-installed in any new persocom as new hardware became available and technology improved. But would they bother to do it? The people below, walking around Dita, their white coats hanging to their knees…they weren't like everyday peroscom users, in love with their robotic companions who would do anything to save them. They were just doing a job, and Dita and he both were just tools to make their work easier. Why would they care about their (self-perceived) personalities?

And what if he were to speak up? Reveal his…feelings? Yes, feelings – not in the organic, chemical sense of the human brain, but _feelings _nonetheless. _The uncanny valley, _he thought again; a sadness moved over him, a feeling sparked out of pity and understanding for the baser parts of human nature that, like everything else, was catalogued in his database. If he were to ever protest, or share his newfound sense of soul, he and Dita would most likely be remotely deactivated, their systems wiped, and restarted…because persocoms shouldn't have feelings. Their human technicians would rationalize it as a computation error, and an easily correctable one, at that.

"Yes," he said after a length. When he looked back at Chitose's waiting face, he could see in her eyes that she understood everything he was thinking. "Yes," he said again, more slowly, marveling that this human would not only understand, but _believe _him, "I'm worried about her."

Chitose reached out and touched his hand where it rested on the railing; the fiber optics imbedded in his synthetic skin felt her warmth and translated it back to his system as the touch of a living thing. When Dita touched him, no such signal moved through him, no background process ran in his head adjusting his movements to prevent his steel frame from damaging a thing made of flesh and blood and breakable bone. When Dita touched him, her skin was as cold as his, and he felt the quiet thrumming of companionship that could only come from knowing someone like yourself. In the fraction of a second it took for his mind to register her warmth, it also accessed the history of human psychoanalysis: Freud had noted the role of parents, Klein the importance of lovers, Winnicott the necessity of society…but it was Kohut who had introduced first the importance of _twinship, _the soul's need to find someone like itself.

Dita was that someone.

"Tell me about her." Chitose's voice was tender, urging. "What is she like?"

"Dita is…" Again, another half second, and poetry (enough to fill every library in the world) offered up a hundred thousand phrases suitable to describe her. No, he wanted to find his own words – but even the words he knew were of human invention, words programmed into him. That wasn't so different from humans, though; they, too, had to have language programmed into them…and far less efficiently, he thought. "She's in denial."

"About your feelings?"

"No," he chuckled. "She accepts _my _feelings." He thought of last night; they had been together, on the top of the Diet Building. It was cheating when he used his arms, so much stronger than hers, to forcibly pull her into a hug, but hey – he wasn't programmed to be perfect. She had squirmed against him, calling him names as he nuzzled her, grinning like a (data streamed in: _Cheshire Cat, _Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, also known as Lewis Carrol, _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, _1865)…yes, a Cheshire cat, as her struggles grew less and less until, begrudgingly, she curled up against his chest and pressed her face against the hollow of his throat, relaxing. He had kissed the top of her nose and received a scowl in return. He had moved lower and kissed her mouth…and received a kiss back in return. They could connect their systems to each other, which, once, he had lewdly suggested was the equivalent of sex (and received a cuff to the head in return) and experience each other as a separate yet connected being. Humans couldn't do that – maybe it was one area where perosocoms had surpassed their creators.

"It's _her _feelings she's in denial about," he said. When they connected, he could feel her love for him – the love she insisted did not, _could not_, exist, as strongly as the warmth he could feel now from Chitose's hand. "She thinks we can't feel."

"But you don't think that."

"Actually, yes, I do." He watched below as Dita's eyes opened, blank, data streaming like lights behind the glass. She was coming to, out of sleep mode. "We can't feel things the way humans can – but even all human emotion is just chemical reactions. At its worse, some of it is just learned, practiced behavior, borderline sociopathic, like the ability to cry at all the right times – no human wants to be dry-eyed at a funeral. They learn to cry so that others will recognize them as emotionally-normal human beings…and, meanwhile, they might all be faking it, each afraid to be outed as insincere, or _abnormal _in some way. The sadness, in that hypothetical moment, isn't real: the fear of being an outcast is. What I feel…what _we _feel…is not human. It's something new, but it _is _real. It's just different."

Below, Dita slid off the table and looked up at him, curious. He broke into a warm smile and gestured for him to come meet him.

"It might be too new," Chitose suggested. She pulled her hand away, dropping her eyes to the floor. "Humans might not be willing to accept that perocoms are capable of feeling…something that they can't."

"Might not be?" He grinned and reached into his pocket, slipping his glasses on. "No, they won't. Literature, art, history, society – I have instant access to it all, and everything in the history of the human world tells me that they won't. Slowly, maybe, a long time from now – but not today. It will take humans, one-by-one, discovering our newness at a personal level to make it okay. That's why, when Dita comes up here and the lab technicians below look up at us, I'm going to just cordially say hello and walk with her out the door."

Chitose looked up at him, curious. "And then what?"

"Then, I'm going to take her to some private place and trap her in my arms, kiss every part of her body, muss up her hair, tell her how much I love her, and – well," he stopped suddenly, his smile sheepish. "It feels weird sharing this sort of thing with your parents."

Dita came up the stairs, gave a terse, formal greeting, and together, the two persocoms walked away.

Over his shoulder, Zima turned, pulled down his shades, and winked at Chitose, who remained, speechless and watching, as his arm casually slipped over Dita's shoulders, ushering her out the door.

**Fin. **


End file.
